An Approach to Variability Management in Enterprise Architecture

Increasing tendency of organizations operating on an international scale results in higher variation of company's business models and operations. Royal Philips N.V is one of the multinational companies facing the challenge of managing differences in the processes caused by country-specific fiscal regulations. The differences in regulations drive variability not only in the process design, but also in supporting application and technology architecture. Variability management on the architecture design level has been extensively discussed in the Software Product Line Engineering and Business Process Management fields. However, only limited research has been done on handling variability in enterprise architecture. The goal of the research paper is to address the challenges caused by variation in the requirements that impact architecture design of the enterprise. In this paper, we propose an approach to identify, document and model variability in a structured way and suggest an extension to enhance the core enterprise architecture metamodel with variability management concepts.